Home > Szmul Zygielbojm
Szmul Zygielbojm was a Polish Politician and leader of Polish Jews. In 1943 he committed a suicide to protest the voidness of Allied governments of United Kingdom and United States in the face of Holocaust. There are two monuments: one erected in London and one in Warsaw to comemorate Zygielbojm.The Last Letter of Szmul Zygielbojm
To President W. Rackiewicz
To the Chairman of the Council of Ministers - W. Sikorski
I take the liberty of addressing to you my last words and through you to the Polish government and people, to the governments and peoples of the Allied states and to the conscience of the world...
The responsibility for the crime of murdering all the Jewish population in Poland falls, in the first instance, on the perpetrators, but indirectly it also burdens the whole of humanity, upon the peoples and governments of the Allied states that, so far, have made no effort towards a concrete action to put a stop to this crime...
I cannot remain silent. I cannot live while the remnants of the Jewish people in Poland whose representative I am are being exterminated. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto perished with their weapons in their hands in their last heroic battle. It was not my destiny to die as they did, together with them. But I belong to them and in their mass graves.
By my death I wish to make the strongest possible protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little human life is worth today, but as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall help to break down the indifference of those who have the possibility now, at the last moment to save those Polish Jews still alive, from certain annihilation.
My life belongs to the Jewish people in Poland and, therefore, I give it to them. I wish that the surviving remnants of the several millions of Polish Jews could live to see, with the Polish population, the liberation that it could know in Poland, in a world of freedom and in the justice of socialism. I believe that such a Poland will arise and that such a world will come.
I bid farewell to everybody and everything that was dear to me and that I have loved.
Szmul Zygielbojm
